Just unbelievable! What do you need to do to get a company to apologise?! Vision Express are officially INCOMPETENT!


So; I went out on Satruday to the rather splendid Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham – home to the now iconic Selfridges building.

Whilst the First Born Son was asleep and the Significant Other was stuck in a queue I thought I would stick my nose into Vision Express and get them to tweak my glasses which had developed a small but annoying twist in the frame.

This proved to be my mistake. Going into a shop as vehemently incompetent as Vision Express that is.

I sat down and the assistant gleefully took my glasses to be adjusted in the “laboratory” (without I might add indicating in any way at all that there was any risk associated with untrained apes jumping up and down on my glasses in a laughable attempt at “adjustment”)

So; I am sitting there in a hideous daze of uncorrected short-sightedness, counting my one and only blessing – that First Born Son is blissfully asleep and unware of the horror about to unfold. So; the assistant returns with the glasses in two parts. Seems that the apes had tried to just twist them violently. Now, even I as an untrained, non-expert diletante knows when to stop twisting the glasses so that they do not break!

And at this point you’d have thought wouldn’t you that there would be some hint of an apology, some indication of remorse, but no! – in a branch staffed entirely by people below the age of 30 no one dared to admit that they had done anything wrong! No indication that taking my property and damaging it beyond use was in any way at all a bad thing!

The assistant tells me that they will of course replace the glasses; fair play on that point and credit where credit is due. (this apart from the fact that I would have caused utter unadulterated mayhem to that branch if they had not done so….) and then goes on to tell me – with a straight face – that due to the queues I would have to wait an hour and a half until I could see an optician to get my eyes checked so they could work out my prescription and make up a new pair of glasses.

This nearly caused me to go postal on the spot – I mean, they are the ones that broke my property and would stop me driving home that day… so how the hell was I supposed to get my Son home to feed him when he awoke? I proceeded to apprise them of these facts; in detail and at length, and they managed to get me in to see an optician straight away.

Then they told me to sit and wait for an hour and the glasses would be made up in their lab. So I did.

At the end of the hour I was desperate to use the gentlemen’s facilities and asked if I could use theirs: the nearest public one was halfway up a flight of stairs and therefore inaccessible to me with the baby in the pushchair. They refused, saying they were not for customer use. Fair enough I reply; give me my glasses and I will leave and find some others somewhere. The minion duly leaves to find out where they were.

Nothing.

An hour and ten minutes later I ask again where they are. Again nothing.

An hour and twenty minutes later – and just about ready to piss in their pot plants – I ask again.
Some underage idiot starts to soft-soap me “please be patient; I will go and check now” etc, etc (but again – no apology) – and he fails to move and do ANYTHING – just stands there mouthing meaningless platitudes. I have to cut across him and say “SHUT UP AND JUST GO AND GET MY PROPERTY THAT YOUR COMPANY HAS BROKEN! RIGHT NOW!!

So he did; FINALLY. I left there with such a bad taste in my mouth it is unbelievable. Not one person got it into their head that I might be annoyed that they had destroyed my property and did NOT APPRECIATE being forced to sit in their shop for 100 minutes of my Saturday. They could not see that even being asked to wait in the queue was not my idea as it was not my fault I was there! And not one of them could conceive of the fact that to just apologise to me – EVEN ONCE – would calm my temper down massively. Not one person owned the problem; no manager came out to say sorry; and HOW THE HELL DOES A SO CALLED PROFESSIONAL OPTICIANS BREAK THE GLASSES WHEN TRYING TO FIX THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

Avoid these idiots at all costs.

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